Progressive Eugenics

One thing no one is allowed to notice is that Progressives have a deep fascination with eugenics. Every liberal friend I have thinks there are too many people. They blame climate change on over population. The inability to build roads is the fault of too many people spilling out of the cities into the countryside. Even explaining to them the math of population density does not change their mind.

Progressives have a long history with eugenics. A century ago American Progressives were preaching the virtues of forced sterilization as a way to fix the population. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme court case upholding a Virginia law that authorized the state to surgically sterilize certain “mental defectives” without their consent.

In fact, America was the leader in the eugenics movement, not the Germans. This is an example of where fascism relied on an American intellectual development to inform their own views. Margaret Sanger, of course, was a raving eugenicist, in addition to being a nut. She wanted the state to distribute babies based on the fitness of potential parents.

As I said at the start, we’re not allowed to talk about this anymore. Instead, we must pretend that Ted Cruz wants to pack Bibles into the wombs of young women and sew their legs shut. While that’s happening, the Left can force young girls onto birth control in the public school system.

The school in question is mostly minority. According to Great Schools, it is 68% non-white. The demographics of the surrounding area tell me this is where the SWPL’s send the poor whites and minorities. The Feds are paying for this scheme through an anti-poverty program. The map tells me there are a plethora of abortion clinics nearby.

For as long as I have been alive, Progressives have worked to put the poor and black on mandatory birth control. The argument they use these days is that unwanted children keeps poor women poor. Getting them on birth control means they can go to school and get out of the ghetto. The fact that fifty years of doing this has not worked is not seen as a deterrent.

The thing about this is many people reading this would probably agree with mandatory birth control in these schools. I think there is a good argument for making birth control a condition of public assistance. If you’re on the dole, you get fixed. That’s for males too. Vasectomies are reversible so if you want your free cheese, drop trow and look to your left.

Similarly, drug testing the dependent is debatable, even if you are in favor of legalizing drugs. Getting high is a luxury item and people on the dole should not be spending on luxury items. On the other hand, having the idle high on drugs probably makes them more docile so maybe the libertarians will make drug taking mandatory for the dependent.

The bottom line here is that eugenics have always been a big part of the Progressive future. It has always been there. Sanger argued that “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.” She also wanted to “Give dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or compulsory sterilization.”

They have softened the language, but scratch the paint of a Progressive and you will also reveal a swastika.

3 thoughts on “Progressive Eugenics

  1. “On the other hand, having the idle high on drugs probably makes them more docile so maybe the libertarians will make drug taking mandatory for the dependent.”

    Look, I know you despise libertarians, but could you list a few of the schemes libertarians have decided were good enough to be made ‘mandatory’?

  2. Don’t forget that John Holdren, Obama’s highly prized science advisor, was closely allied with Paul Erlich in alarm about population — neo-Malthusians both. And shared the famous wager with Julian Simon about the depletion of a group of five key metals. They thought they would depleted, but all five were more plentiful and the price had decreased. Like many progressives it’s a completely negative, hopeless view of today’s real world and the future — unless we move to the glorious future of the progressives, or something like that.

    I am beginning to believe that progressives (the PC appellation) are just out of touch with reality since they get all their information from progressive talking points.

  3. I always thought it interesting that it was about the same time that geneticists figured out that there was some kind of instruction set embedded in cells that the “breeding charts” at CSHL were declared verbotten (in a manner that is very familiar to us now) and the serious effort was all shifted from “hard” eugenics to discovering the code. I would argue that sometime in the 1930’s the Anglo-American branch of the the progressives switched from eugenics to genetic engineering.

    Of course it will be a few more years before we’ll start screwing with the germ line in any meaningful way, so I agree, the progressives, having learned that large scale coercion is expensive and painful, have settled on an interim, soft, gramscian eugenics:

    • Bringing a lot of smart, young people together in universities with roughly equal proportions of both sexes. Likewise tearing down barriers to entry for women in most jobs. Successful men therefore became very unlikely to breed with curvaceous but not too bright secretaries, but rather with other elite women screened and tested for desirable traits though 16-plus years schooling.

    • Incentivizing the washouts from the winnowing process to not have children, especially at the low end of the scale.

    • In general, promoting low fertility. As large as the human population is right now, you are probably not going to miss some crucial gene just because one of the elite decides not to have children.

    The problem that this program is running into is that, like everything else the progressives try to control, the invisible hand of natural selection is very hard to stay. This is my friend’s idea, not mine, but we have now had three or four generations of children in the developed world who have not been subject to much evolutionary pressure. The waves of mass neuroses that we are experiencing right now are emanating from precisely those people who would have never made it past infancy, or at the best, early childhood in pre-modern times. At this point we are now seeing the children of children of children who never would have made it to adolescence for all of human history. Their kind has never been seen before for the very simple reason that their kind has never existed before in any large numbers.

    Maybe there is a good reason for successful men to be attracted to bubbly, curvy women. Just like socialism, I don’t think this is turning out the way the progressives planned it.

    Maybe that’s why the Cult is so desperate to get women in combat jobs right now. Their goal was to produce the 1930’s Ivy League ideal of smart, athletic and socially adept. Instead they got Emma Sulkowicz. In that light, the attempt to make the military a 50/50 mix of the sexes is really a way to hedge their bets and create an athletic-intellectual caste.

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